Quote from Battle Creek Enquirer: “Martinez-Cola has written her first book, “The Bricks before Brown,” published by the University of Georgia Press. It focuses on Chinese American, Native American and Mexican Americans’ struggle for educational equality leading up to the seminal 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. the Board of Education, that deemed segregated schools unconstitutional.”
Marisela Martinez-Cola is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Utah State University. She is an intersectional scholar with a research focus on comparative critical race studies. Her teaching focus is on race & ethnicity, social movements, and qualitative methods. She has been published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Latino Studies, Understanding and Dismantling Privilege, Law & Society, and Teaching Sociology. Her forthcoming book, The Bricks Before Brown v. Board of Education, will be published in The University of Georgia’s Race and Ethnicity Series. It is an intersectional, comparative, and interdisciplinary study of Mexican American, Native American, and Chinese American school desegregation cases that came before the famed 1954 case that dismantled the “separate but equal” doctrine. She earned her bachelors at The University of Michigan (African American Studies), her law degree at Loyola University Chicago School of Law, and her doctorate at Emory University. She has been a member of SWS since 2016 and served as co-chair for Travel Arrangements for the 2017 Winter Meeting in Atlanta, GA. Marisela Martinez-Cola is a Co- Chair of Committee on Discrimination for SWS.